BASE jumping and The Harm Principle

After reading the article, It’s More Like a Suicide Than a Sport written by Ed Caesar.I wanted to know  why anyone would put their life in danger, and then the thought came into my mind; how would Mill react to the riskiness of this sport. I Google  searched for the information and found many articles. Ed Grabianowski in his article explains that the name “BASE jumping” is an acronym for the four types of objects that people jump from. “BASE” stands for Buildings, Antennas, Spans or bridges, and Earth. BASE jumpers jump from various cliffs and high man-made  buildings, towers, bridges, and airplanes, at low altitudes with only a few seconds to deploy the parachute. There is no time available for jumpers to deal with problems or malfunctions.

Gender’s Role in Sports

As explained by Professor Mika LaVaque-Manty, in lecture on October 23rd ,2014 about the role of sex and gender in our society, and how these different ideologies and standards put pressure on individuals to represent themselves. He further explained different institutional and value barriers that both men and women face in every sphere of their daily life. How these different categories; sex as biological and gender as social culture impact the sports. These differences bring a struggle between masculinity and femininity, moreover; professional sports add strains of gender differences to this social phenomenon. These gender differences create a challenge for women to be accepted in a male dominant and masculine institution of sports. While learning about these social norms in “Political Science” class, I could see the connection between the theories I learned in my other class “Intro to Women’s Studies”. Both of these classes are completely different but this lecture on October 23rd of Pol. Sci. and Intro to Women’s Studies has direct connection with women in sports. I learned in another class how gender difference in sports encourages or sometimes forces to sexualize women through media.

Dirty Hands and Sports Culture

Dirty Hands and Sports Culture
We have discussed in class, about Machiavelli’s “The Prince” “The Prince” and the Dirty Hand principle. We discussed in the class how politicians are forced to make decisions even when they know it’s immoral and wrong. While thinking about writing this blog, I was wondering what aspects of the society other than politics we can connect with the concept of the Dirty Hand. I think we can connect every situation with this concept that has an competition and outcome in the end as winner. With the idea of professionalism and expectation to win to get successful, people are in a way forced to adopt the principle of the Dirty Hand and justify their actions so they can win the competition.
For this blog, I am going to focus on the principle of the Dirty Hand and sports because sports is the theme of the class. Moreover, I believe the Dirty Hand principle may be applicable to sports because the motive of each and every player when they compete in an event is to win. It becomes more important to win in the case of super stars of the game. Sports like ice hockey have had a long history of violent fighting which leave some hockey fans disgusted with the game. However, people continue to watch the game and most of the time they even support the violence because may be its an entertainment for them, moreover, they want their home team to win no matter by what means they adopt. The issue of violence and problem of discipline in any game may be considered Dirty Hand because players knowingly use the violence and break the rules of the game in order to hurt the players of the other team so their team can win.